Increasing transparency and accountability through the use
of open data

6.
RCAHMS

11. Marine Laboratory

Generating improved civic engagement through the use of
open data

2. Crichton Institute

Engaging data users in the process

8.
SEWeb:
Ecohack

9. Perth and Kinross

Building a business case around open data

10.
NHSNSS:
ISD

Improving data governance through the use of open data

7. Registers of Scotland

Generating innovation and economic growth through the use
of open data

4. Edinburgh Council

5. Edinburgh Council

If you have a case study you would like to share or you would
like to be put in touch with the case study subjects, then get in
touch - OpenDataPolicy@gov.scot.

1. Clackmannanshire Council: Open Data Scotland
and Code for Europe

Many of the problems which Open Data is typically used to solve
don't exist in a small Council. Mass transportation isn't an issue
with only 3 bus routes. There isn't a developer community taking
part in hack events and generating innovative applications. Why
then should a small Council pursue Open Data?

Open Data affords opportunities to be more efficient, whether
through being nimble by adopting freely available Civic Apps to
improve service delivery or by reducing the time spent responding
to information requests from the public or partners. In time, it is
likely that we will be required by statute to share more data
anyway.

Location based services will become increasingly important. In
the near future citizens will expect to be able to use their
personal device and using the tools of their choice, see and
interact with services which are nearby. In order for Council
services to be part of this world, data about those services must
be published openly.

Background

'Open Data Scotland' is a programme which has involved over the
last year, four of Scotland's local authorities - Edinburgh,
Aberdeen, East Lothian and Clackmannanshire. Aberdeen and Edinburgh
City Councils have been at the leading edge of nascent open data
work in Scotland and can be seen as 'mature' players, willing to
share their knowledge and expertise with others. East Lothian and
Clackmannanshire came to the programme with little or no experience
of open data, but with an ambitious attitude and a willingness to
experiment and embrace innovation.

Each local authority was appointed a 'Code Fellow in Residence'
(a technologist) who has worked intensively with the local
authority staff over 12 months to open up data sets, publish these
on a portal so they can be re-used and created new digital public
services - apps and web content to enhance both citizens and
visitors experiences of the local authority. A 'Designer in
Residence' also worked with the technologists and local authority
staff across the four authorities.

We have been part of the wider 'Code for Europe' programme which
has involved designers and technologists across Europe working with
civic authorities to increase the use of open data sets to enhance
civic transparency and improve decision making.

Clackmannanshire Council is Scotland's smallest mainland local
authority and their learning from the programme below demonstrates
that this is not beyond the reach of any government agency or
public body in Scotland, with the right culture and access to
skills.

Approach

With little prior knowledge of Open Data, our initial ambition
for this project was to develop a mobile app which would provide
personalised access to childcare resources as part of the early
intervention strand in our 'Making Clackmannanshire Better' change
programme.

As the project evolved we focused on three main areas: Knowledge
Transfer, Developing a Portal and our Childcare Application.

Knowledge transfer provided Council officers with information
about standards and systems used in Open Data, the ecosystem of
agencies involved in Open Data and the sources of existing Open
Data applications which were available for re-use.

Outcome

We successfully built a
CKAN Open
Data portal and developed an app called Clacks Kids which is a
location based service directory. Spin-off activities have lead us
to develop an open
GIS
mapping portal which is likely to inform our future
GIS
Strategy and a reporting platform based on the Open311
standard.

Lessons learned

The biggest lesson is that even a very small Council can
engage with Open Data. The key components are having access to
people with the right skills and attitudes, easy access to
servers and software with which to tinker, and permission to
experiment.

Developing an Open Data infrastructure is important if the
project is to be sustainable. While the "app" may be the most
high impact product, without the infrastructure there will be no
data to use in the app. Apps are also transient, they will be
replaced by other apps in future.

Follow your nose! We have revamped our
GIS
infrastructure opening up the opportunity of significant future
cost savings as a direct consequence of our need to provide
mapping tools for this project.

Civic Apps are not as easily transferrable from one Council
to another as you might expect.

In a shrinking Council, persuading others to prioritise your
project can be difficult especially when there is nothing
concrete to demonstrate. You need to have something to show
people. Once we had a working app, we then found services coming
on board as they could see how it could be used.

2. Crichton Institute: Regional
Observatory

In promoting this project both within and beyond the region,
both local and global issues have collided. It is clear that new
technology has created an accelerating hunger for information and
we have observed with interest the parallel dialogue around Open
Government and the 'Smart City' agenda. It seems to us that there
is something of gap in strategic thinking and policy and we have
been asking the question: '…if there is such a thing as the
Smart City, what would the Smart Countryside look like…?'.
So there is a dialogue that needs to take place about
rural-specific opportunities in the open sharing of data and
service improvement and provision which we feel we should
follow.

The above issue is compounded by the overall capacity
constraints which rural agencies face. While an obvious plea would
be for more resources for rural areas in this field, there are
perhaps more immediate advances that can be made by better sharing
of experience and existing resources currently being directed to
urban areas/solutions.

Raising this issue has gained us some exposure. We have, in
addition, been cited as an example of regional-level data
innovation in the recently published
SG Open Data
Strategy. We have also been encouraged by the fact that others,
including those much better resourced than us, have had to grapple
with the same issues and that we are seeing emerge a community of
like-minded people who are prepared to provide advice and
support.

Background

Crichton Institute is a Scottish Funding Council (
SFC) funded
collaboration involving the academic partners based on the
multi-institutional Crichton Campus in Dumfries, south-west
Scotland (University of Glasgow, University of West of Scotland,
SRUC, Open
University, Dumfries & Galloway College). The Regional
Observatory is one of the strategic arms of the Institute and has
been in development since the start of
CI in January 2013.
CI's work has very
much concentrated on Dumfries & Galloway. The
SFC funding
period comes to an end in December 2016.

The objective of
RO is to provide an
information and knowledge portal that acts as a one-stop open
access service for open data, information and intelligence on a
wide range of social, economic and environmental factors across
Dumfries and Galloway and the South of Scotland.

Approach

Rural areas have in general been poorly resourced in terms of
data gathering, access and usage and D&G and the South of
Scotland are no exception. In many cases, public and 3rd sector
agencies have had to resource external consultancy to assist with
even the most basic of regional data gathering and interpretation
(the exception being the local
NHS Board which
has a well - resourced public health intelligence unit). Effective
data sharing has, as a consequence, been somewhat the
exception.

With a lack of capacity and no consistent track record of high
level collaboration, the benefits to be derived from sound data
management and data sharing have not been fully understood or
exploited. While individual agencies are striving to take advantage
of new information and communications technologies, the absence of
effective data management is inhibiting the genuine desire to move
to a more 'open government/open data' culture. Change in recent
developments in Community Planning, a move towards better
understanding the needs of service users and service integration
(within and between agencies) is however supporting the drive
towards a culture of open government/open data in the region. In
fact, over the last few months Dumfries & Galloway Council (
DGC) have
auditing their records management and are working on an open data
strategy. At the same time Third Sector Interface in D&G have
been working with
Think Data Scotland around the issues of data gathering
and sharing within the Third Sector community
http://www.thinkdata.org.uk.

Outcome

The setting up of the
RO was approached
as much as an organisational development and trust-building issue
as simply an exercise in data management/sharing. Hence the
RO has been
developed in close collaboration with the Dumfries and Galloway's
Community Planning Partnership. The objective from the outset has
been to ensure buy-in to the concepts of Open Government,
collaboration, service improvement and data sharing across
institutions, communities and businesses across the region.

The first step was to engage in discussions with the local
Community Planning Partnership to ensure that there was a view that
such a thing as a data observatory was needed, but also that there
was high level cross-agency support for its development. The
proposal was greeted with enthusiasm and two tranches of support
funding for the early development stages of the Observatory.

With support secured, an initial Technical Group was established
which included representatives from
DGC,
NHS Dumfries and
Galloway (
NHSDG),
Scottish Centre for Enabling Technologies (
SCET)
and
CI.

This group worked together to agree on the vision, look and feel
of the online portal, the process of populating it, maintaining it
and promoting it. As part of this some desk research was done to
look into what other observatories and open data portals offer.
Some of these were approached directly to inform us whether we were
heading in the right direction. Armed with this background, a
Project Initiation Document was agreed and specialist part-time
consultancy engaged to convert the vision into reality.

One issue we struggled with was '…when do we go
public…?' We were confident with the basic
functionality/feel of the portal, but less assured on content
issues. We have made life difficult with the notion that our
customers would not just be the usual professional data-users. Our
vision also included, for example, local P6 pupils using the portal
for a project on "Jobs in our Region", complete with map-building
and visualisation tools.

We decided to opt for a 'soft launch' of the
RO website in June
2014. The Technical Group became the Data Suppliers Group. With the
key technical issues addressed and the portal functioning it was
felt that the 'harvesting' of data and documents should now widen
to include others, for instance Third Sector Interface Dumfries
& Galloway. Approaches have been made to Police Scotland and
other local community organisations. These discussions have served
a dual purpose. As well as serving to promote the
RO and secure
further data access, they have opened up dialogue about the
promotion of data sharing, better understanding, and more effective
service delivery. This was supported through a workshop in the
autumn of 2014, which was also attended by Scottish Government
providing us with confirmation that we are moving in the right
direction and that we have the same issues as other open data
projects.

However, even though feedback has been overwhelmingly positive
and encouraging as people like our vision and the objective,
non-partisan approach, since
RO does not have
any authority over the various stakeholders, progression around
data 'harvesting' has been extremely slow.

Lessons Learned

With Phase 1 of the project complete, we have a well-
functioning and attractive portal, though it is still fairly
one-dimensional. However, local stakeholders and the discussions as
part of the autumn workshop showed a great interest in
RO providing access
to a regional economic dashboard, providing instant, up-to-date
access to key economic performance data for D&G, as well as
access to interactive mapping and other visualisation tools. With
not having technical expertise within
RO and the Data
Suppliers Group we were looking at how best to enhance the portal.
This led us to the School of Computing Science at the University of
Glasgow. After detailed conversations we ended up with 140 3
rd year Computing Science students who worked on a
number of
IT related
projects with
RO and other
D&G based organisations: Crichton Carbon Centre,
NHS Dumfries
& Galloway, Third Sector Interface D&G and The Stove
Network. A total of 11 projects presented a range of real-life
challenges to the students helping to find
IT solutions to
questions such as:

How can regional economic indicators be visualised and made
more accessible to everybody?

How can we sell waste products from our industrial process,
rather than land-filling?

How can individuals find out about local volunteering events
and sign up to participate?

How can I discover where people go and what they do in my
visitor centre?

Prototypes were created and in some cases the solutions offered
are of such quality that the intention is to have them go live. One
of the projects also looked at a redesign of the
RO website, using
WordPress for the actual website, while bolting on
CKAN open
source application to deal with the data.

This collaboration provided a great platform to show what is
possible, but it also left us again in a situation that, unless we
find resources to secure technical support we are unable to migrate
the projects, implement them, maintain and further develop the
solutions given to us.

3. The City of Edinburgh Council:
ARC-E
App

The app enables the service area (Health & Social Care) to
open up data that was not previously available to the public in
this format. Previously service information for addition recovery
support groups in Edinburgh had only been available through leaflet
and
PDF formats. An
API
was created with this data and can be shared with the app and other
applications.

The app has been built so that it is scalable and more features
can be added. The framework of the app can also be redeveloped to
suit other groups with similar needs.

Background

ARC-E
App was created by TM&R Ltd (Anne-Marie McMann and Ella
Robbins) and developed by David Morrison as part of the
EdinburghApps 2014 civic challenge programmed.

The application, the Addiction Recovery Companion - Edinburgh
app (
ARC-E app),
is aimed to support those in the process of recovery from an
addiction. The app allows users to document and reflect on their
progress, becoming a constant companion and supporting them as they
help themselves. It will make it possible for people who already
have some support from Council services to use their mobile device
to help them in their recovery from addiction.

Approach

The approach taken to develop the app was an agile, co-creative
approach. Through working this way the team have been able to
develop the app with the Council service area and services users to
ensure that the deliverables are being met and a worthwhile product
is created.

Design & Build

The approach of the design was to put the needs, wants and
limitations of the

users at the heart of the design process. From the start, the
project ran focus groups with potential users of the app to inform
on how to move forward. First the team made sure that the
objectives reflected problems that impacted recovering addicts and
then tested and iterated on potential solutions using low-cost
prototypes before implementing them.To build the product, a version
of the Scrum agile development approach was adopted and adapted to
fit the small and distributed team. This approach recognises that
requirements often change during a project and the team has to be
in a position where it can quickly adapt to these changes.

The project was divided into objective themes. Each objective
theme contained a collection of user stories and at the end of
every iteration the team produced a build of the app. This build
was tested against the user stories for the iteration and used as
an artifact for user testing. This allowed the Council to assess
the current build for milestone acceptance and potential users to
test and feedback on its value to them. The outcomes of testing
influenced the planning of future iterations
e.g. new user stories maybe
added to the backlog or remove ones that have been shown to be
invalid. This ensures that a meaningful product is being built at
every stage.

Outcome

ARC-E App
was developed in order to:

improve access to appropriate local support services and
information about the service.

make it straightforward for users to reach out for immediate
support in times of crisis.

help users keep track their appointments and commitments,
related to managing their recovery.

keep users up-to-date on events organised by the council or
by members of the recovery community that might be relevant to
their recovery.

allow users to look back at daily messages to support
motivation to stay on track.

allow users to access mindfulness activities, particular
during a crisis/emergency.

The app is available for both
Apple
and
Android
devices and is generating interest as this solution is reusable for
other authorities providing this service, as well as offering other
re-use options.

Lessons Learned

The main lessons learned have been around working co-creatively.
The client (Health and Social Care) and the end user (people in
recovery from addiction) have been involved at every step of the
process. Working this way has ensured that milestones have been hit
on time and on budget whilst creating an app that meets the user's
needs and achieves the objectives set out by Health and Social
Care.

4. The City of Edinburgh Council: Edinburgh
Apps

This programme is completely transferrable to any other
organisation and sector. Edinburgh did not create something that
was untried - civic challenge competitions take place all over the
world, and are very successful. Supporting events, hack weekends,
data days
etc. are also happening widely, and
are not expensive to produce. All of these events add to learning
and increases awareness of the power of open data. It is a new way
of working, but it is already the way many companies work, and
something the public sector needs to do to find efficient and cost
effective solutions.

Edinburgh's track record speaks for itself - its agile approach
to development meant that quality products could be built quickly
and were known to meet customer needs. Most of the products are
shareable which means the public sector can use them right now.

Background

Launched in 2013, EdinburghApps was the first event of its kind
in the
UK, a civic challenge
programme that works with the Council and other partners,
encouraging developers, designers, creatives and small businesses
to take part, and offering winners business support and the
potential opportunity to work with the Council to develop their
concepts further. Participants choose from challenges set by the
Council around a number of key themes.

At its core is a vision to change the city through encouraging
innovation with technology, design and user-centric development.
Edinburgh has exceptional design and tech communities and a large
number of young companies in these areas whose fresh thinking mean
that Edinburgh has great opportunities to produce original and
cutting edge solutions to city challenges.

The programme of challenge events:

supports growth of and partnership with new
IT, design and
other related businesses and partners in the city

encourages a digital culture change internally, supporting
skill development for council officers

delivers innovative and efficient solutions for the Council's
customers, in line with the Council's priorities and the
ICT
and Digital Strategy objectives.

Edinburgh Apps was developed to support the Council's Open Data
strategy. For each challenge, data sets are shared, increasing the
Council's delivery of open data and opportunities for innovation
EdinburghApps wants to change the city by providing creative,
customer driven solutions to city challenges. It aims to work with
everyone interested in making this change happen.

Approach

EdinburghApps began as an annual once a year competition with
the Council providing challenges and teams taking part over 6/7
weeks to develop strong concepts or/and prototypes which are then
judged in a final event. The winners then have the opportunity to
work with the Council to develop their ideas, and deliver
products.

EdinburghApps now runs a range of events to encourage solution
finding working with key partners, Council officers and
customers

Annual challenge competition

Subject hackathons

Service area mini events

All of these events aim to support partners in finding
innovative solutions to business and city challenges. Data is a
core requirement in all of this, and is published as open data
whenever possible.

Winners of these events have the opportunity to take forward
their proposal for development with the appropriate area.

The benefits of this approach are:

Delivery of new digital products which meet a clearly defined
need

Delivery using an agile approach, and at a far reduced cost
to working with larger companies

Customised solutions, co-created, which are built directly to
meet requirements

Building longer term relationships with local
IT &
Digital companies

Opportunities to support the growth of the city's business
economy

The competition event is now in its third year and has been very
successful encouraging a wide range of entries and the delivery of
a number of products. These include:

Tend - routing tool which optimises planning and deliveries
for Health and Social Care's Equipment Delivery Service

Run The City - an app aimed
at visitors looking to explore the city using running routes,
offering a commentary on places on interest

ARC-Edinburgh
- a buddy app to support those in recovery programmes for
addiction

The Council has helped winners to start their business from
scratch, and also supported participants to find other business
opportunities.
Edinburgh Up
Close was also recently launched, working with technology
developed by a winner from EdinburghApps 2013.

The event runs in three events - a kick off weekend, a midway
workshop and the judging final.

Outcomes

When EdinburghApps was first launched it was intended to bring
about a number of benefits, including:

new thinking to solve city challenges

innovation in technology and design

the sharing of civic data

stimulate the city economy through working with
SMEs

social change for the city

The programme has achieved these outcomes, but it has also
brought about much more:

innovative and cheaper solutions

improved sharing and publishing of open data

ongoing relationships with new businesses

change to ways of working

awareness raising for open data

new business thinking

benefits to customers

Lessons Learned

EdinburghApps has now taken place three times, and hack weekends
have also been run in between to generate wider awareness and
explore specific subject based challenges. In 2016, Edinburgh
expanded their approach to work with partners such as
NHS Lothian and
Sustrans Scotland which meant that challenges could be more
strategic in nature, and provide service improvements that had a
holistic impact. There are synergies for organisations both in
terms of challenges and for product and data usage. Longer term,
Edinburgh will continue to build relationships both with partners
and businesses in the city and with the tech community to achieve
sustainable outcomes.

Edinburgh Council will continue to expand the sharing of data as
well as the sharing of ideas.

Build support: it is important to have a
suitable sponsor in your organisation (and some funding) to do
this. Edinburgh could demonstrate it was achievable because it
had been done elsewhere and this helped them find supporters.
Align with relevant strategies in your organisation, this will
also build support.

Changing business thinking: when Edinburgh
started this programme they didn't realise the impact of bringing
business change into the Council. Inviting developers and
designers to work with them brought fresh thinking and new ways
of working. This has had an interesting internal ripple, and they
now find service areas keen to see what can be achieved, not just
with a product development, but for their service generally.

Data: this is the central component and takes
time to find, cleanse and publish. This can be challenging and
service areas may need help with this work. Ideally a data
resource should be available to do this.

For the competition itself: Edinburgh have
discovered that a mix of skills works better for teams and builds
better prototypes, so they now advertise across a number of
sectors. You need developers to support the whole event, provide
mentoring and knowledge sharing, so build relationships with your
local tech and design communities. Some teams have no idea how to
deliver their idea
- Edinburgh Council are now offering a midway workshop to
help teams learn how to build a proposal, cost and plan their
concept. They have developed their own processes around the event
which include the use of design thinking, customer experience and
business planning.

Challenges: Whoever submits a challenge must now
take part in the whole event, providing further information and
advice for teams. This means that, whoever wins, the challenge
owner is already engaged with them and it makes it easier to take
the project forward.

Funding: funding for the competition is not
straightforward, and should be bundled into a larger business
case for open data and innovation. For those taking part, there
is an expectation that the Council will fund development. In 2016
Edinburgh put in place a co-production approach. Winners continue
to work with challenge owners, who will work to identify funding
once a concept has reached that stage of maturity. A lot of
entrants have full-time occupations, so there would be a risk in
going straight into a contractual arrangement with timelines that
are difficult to meet. Both parties have time instead to reflect
following the event, and can decide how they want to move
forward. For funding, identifying appropriate sources is very
useful; and for this involving funding officers is really
worthwhile.

Sponsors: a range of sponsors and types of
sponsorship are required and this is time consuming to achieve.
It is never too early to start working on this.

Communications: communication has to be regular
and continue throughout the year, not just around events. This
requires resource and should not be under- estimated. Engagement
is essential to keep your audience interested and encourage them
to come back each year. Use appropriate platforms such as Twitter
and Instagram and set up a blog so that you keep everyone up to
date on activities.

Finally, and most importantly, look for any opportunity to work
with others in this area. This is one approach but there many other
methods for engaging and changing thinking, and developing open
data. Build partnerships to make it easier to accomplish more.
Edinburgh work with individual developers and creatives as well as
companies, and we do look for those who have the same goals for
data and innovation and want to see change happen.

5. The City of Edinburgh Council: Run the City
App

The Run the City App solves a challenge faced by running
enthusiasts who are new to the city by providing routes around the
city of different lengths. It increases visitors' engagement with
the city by highlighting city sights and providing engaging
anecdotes.

The app has been built so it is scalable and with the intention
that other cities and routes will be added.

Background

Run the City is a guided tour for runners and winner of the
'wild card' challenge for
EdinburghApps 2014. Runners will always get
their run in, even when away on business, but running in a strange
city is difficult when you don't know where to go. Run the City
solves this challenge as the app, through audio messages, not only
gives runners directions but also highlights their attention to the
city sights and makes their run in Edinburgh more engaging with
anecdotes about the areas they are running through.

It utilises the Council's open data as content for the app and
will also create data the Council can make open.

Approach

The project was undertaken over two main stages the Build Phase,
and the Beta Phase. The initial build phase allowed us to deliver a
minimum value product which could be tested to ensure that on the
project was on track to deliver the objectives before full build
was complete. This also ensures that a valuable product was being
delivered that people wanted to use.

The team that developed the app worked co-creatively with the
Council service area to ensure that the app met customer
expectations and also aligned with Council outcomes.

Build Phase

The build phase developed the main components of the app (login,
cities, routes, tracker, activity, settings, activity timer and
location tracker pages.) In this phase,

before building the user-interface of the app Edinburgh Council
created a route planning functionality, which allowed us to design
and record routes to be uploaded into our app. The milestone for
this phase will be the delivery of the
MVP (Minimum Value
Product)

Beta Phase

This phase involves both production of the audio for the tour
and device testing and user testing. The test app was shared with
runners/walkers around the city and they were asked to test the
runs and report back any ideas or issues they had. Edinburgh
anticipated that user testing of that app would take three to four
weeks but it actually took longer and was carried out in two phases
due to the changes required after feedback was received.

Outcome

An engaging running app, which considers routes which would
appeal to walkers, has been created using Council open data. The
app has been aligned to
EdinburghOutdoors and has
created the additional benefit of creating data which can be
shared.

The app is now live for
Apple
and
Android
users, and is gathering very positive feedback. This is encouraging
the company who developed it to have conversations with a number of
other cities for future development.

Lessons Learned

The idea behind the app was sound, and user research
demonstrated that runners thought it would be a great way to
experience the city. It turned out to be quite a challenging
development, with issues around design and build. A major issue was
calibrating the app for runners and walkers (due to differing
speeds) and getting the geo-location to match. This problem was not
easy to predict - the developer was very experienced; it was just
an issue that had to be understood and solved.

Both members of the new company were in full-time employment
which meant development was elongated. Ideally it would be better
to work with an existing company who could commit specific time to
the project. This would have increased costs and EdinburghApps is
clear that it wants to support new business development.

This development has sparked a lot of thinking around digital
tourism. Cities and towns will have a number of apps in the market
place for their visitors. It is worth giving some consideration as
to the audience you want to target. Our experience suggests that
specific audiences may be more likely to download and use an app on
their visit than general tourists.

6. Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical
Monuments of Scotland -
SENESCHAL:
Semantic ENrichment Enabling Sustainability of arCHAeological
Links

Adopting Linked Open Data can benefit the wider heritage
community through improving standards and introducing efficiencies.
The benefits of publishing controlled vocabularies are starting to
be realised. Simply by adding a
SENESCHAL
RESTful service into their
Collections
Management System, the Archaeology Data Service, University of
York were able to access the authoritative controlled vocabularies
remotely. This not only eliminates errors that inevitably creep in
through free text typing but improves the consistency of indexing
records.

Background

Controlled vocabularies are key to both the storage of
information in the database and its discovery online. In
particular, we use thesauri to help classify the types of monument,
object and maritime craft associated with each site record. We
encourage the use of thesauri standards amongst local Historic
Environment Records (
HERs), who
maintain databases about the historic environment for local
authority areas across Scotland, and more widely amongst the
profession.

For cultural heritage, demand for Linked Open Data came from the
research community. They saw the absence of controlled vocabularies
as limiting opportunities for combining data from different
providers through semantic links.

Major controlled vocabularies should act as hubs for the Web of
Data, but publication as free text strings limits opportunities for
connecting to data published elsewhere. Although we publish our
controlled vocabularies online as thesauri, they are not
particularly visible. The thesaurus for architecture, implemented
in 2005, limits the potential of the terminology as the terms lack
the persistent Uniform Resource Identifiers (
URIs) that
would allow our resources to act as hubs for the Web of Data.
Adopting a Simple Knowledge Organisation System, or
SKOS,
using the
ResourceDescription Framework (RDF)
provides a more flexible approach enabling the vocabulary owner to
define a concept rather than the term. Each concept is expressed as
a
URI. The
concept may then be expressed in any number of ways including
alternate labels, dialect terms or in different languages.

The development of Linked Open Data for cultural heritage is
part of good practice, helping to deliver Government policy towards
transparency and Open Data. Scotland's Open Data Strategy
encourages Public Data to be published in reusable,machine readable
form under an open licence which enables free reuse, including
commercial reuse to open standards following relevant
recommendations of the World Wide Web Consortium. Moreover, Public
Data from different departments about the same subject will be
published in the same, standard formats and with the same
definitions. Defining the concepts used to index records about
cultural heritage is a first step towards meeting that goal. It
introduces the standards and machine- readable formats necessary
for interoperability. However, before becoming operational, it
requires acceptance of the standards, investment in research and
development time beyond the day-to-day operations of many
organisations.

Approach

The solution was to find partners who understood the Linked Open
Data requirements and to secure funding to enable the research and
publication of Linked Open Data. We were fortunate that colleagues
at English Heritage already had an established relationship with
the Hypermedia Research Unit at the University of South Wales and
that there was a shared recognition of the need to publish our
vocabularies as Linked Open Data.

The partnership approach between a university research
department and public bodies enabled a successful application to
the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a one year Knowledge
Exchange project. This made it significantly easier for vocabulary
providers, such as
RCAHMS,
to make their vocabularies available as Linked Data and for users
to index their data with uniquely identified (machine readable)
controlled terminology that is semantically enriched and compatible
with Linked Data.

The resultant
SENESCHAL
project (Semantic ENrichment Enabling Sustainability of
arCHAeological Links) brought together vocabulary providers from
English Heritage,
RCAHMS
and
RCAHMW,
together with the Archaeology Data Service University of York with
the domain experts, Doug Tudhope as Principal Investigator and Ceri
Binding as Research Fellow, at the University of South Wales.
Outcomes

Intended Outcome

Actual Outcome

Freely accessible and reusable persistent vocabulary
resources as linked data, the techniques to achieve this being
made freely available.

Web Services to
SKOS
representations of the vocabularies and semantic enrichment
services, along with web application components

Achieved: Downloads, Services and Widgets published. Users
are able to download the vocabularies in various flavours of
RDF
(N- Triples, Turtle,
JSON or
XML). A
series of
RESTURI
calls have been developed for the vocabularies with results
returned in a
JSON
structured string which permit
AJAX
callbacks for use in browser based applications.

The project has also developed a suite of predefined visual
user interface tools, or
widgets.

Mechanism for feedback of supplementary terms to augment
existing vocabularies

Not Achieved: candidate terms are still submitted through
RCAHMS
own thesaurus management system and data periodically uploaded
to heritagedata.org website

Raising the profile of Linked Open Data with Historic
Environment data curators in Scotland

Achieved: through a workshop was held in Edinburgh at the
end of the project for stakeholders and presentations on Linked
Open Data to stakeholder groups.

Additional outcome:
Demonstrating application of approach to handle
multi-lingual expressions of concepts: During the course of the
project we were able to make use of Gaelic translations of the
monument type vocabulary provided by Historic Scotland from a
Bòrd na Gàidhlig funded project.
So a concept may now be expressed in English or Gaelic,
with a preferred or alternate label.

Lessons learned

Publishing the terminologies as Linked Open Data is the first
tentative step toward delivering cultural heritage data as
5 star data. Maintenance and
update of the terminologies is not seamless and requires periodic
data uploads, so the vocabularies may not be up-to-date
instantaneously.

Exposing controlled vocabularies is inevitably
organisation-driven and there is a need, where appropriate, to
align vocabularies by theme to deliver further efficiencies in
maintaining and developing resources. Through our membership of
MEDIN
we are exploring opportunities to develop more marine and
maritime- related Linked Data vocabularies with colleagues in
Belfast and Dublin.

The benefits of Linked Open Data have still to be fully realised
within the business and more widely across the heritage community.
However, making the terminology more openly accessible as Linked
Data should encourage wider adoption of standard terminology,
develop interoperability with other related resources, and
encourage community feedback on possible improvements to the
vocabularies. Opportunities will continue as part of the new
organisation Historic Environment Scotland when
RCAHMS
and Historic Scotland come together in October 2016 to form the new
lead body for Scotland's historic environment.

Scotland has made significant progress in publishing spatial
data in a prescribed format driven by the
EUINSPIRE
directive. The local government sector is also currently developing
a project to support a more collective approach to the management
and publication of spatial information, providing access to all
spatial data created by local government in a consistent form.

RoS is proud to be at the forefront of the provision of spatial
data. We would recommend any approach that supports collective
management and publication of spatial information. The challenges
faced internally are far outweighed by benefits realised in the
short and longer term.

The experience we have gained over the last seven years with
INSPIRE
has led us to increasingly identify considerable benefits of a
coherent, trusted, and consistent set of information on land and
property in Scotland. Enabling access to core land and property
information in one place where it can be made available to all is
increasingly important for Scotland as a whole.

Background

European
Directive
2007/2/EC, better known as '
INSPIRE,'
was transposed into
UK law in December 2009.
The aim of the directive is to establish a spatial data
infrastructure (
SDI) for
Europe. In general terms, this means providing an
IT infrastructure
which allows access to harmonised spatial data (data collected to
the same standards and requirements) via the internet. In theory,
an
SDI should
improve the access and use of data at local, regional, national and
international levels, improve data sharing between public
authorities, and improve public access to spatial data.

INSPIRE
instructs
EU member states to make
spatial data available in a consistent format which come within the
scope of the directive, as well as providing network services
(mostly internet access) and metadata to support the data. You can
read an informal consolidated text of the Scottish
INSPIRE
regulations
here.

The Scottish government is responsible for the management of
INSPIRE
in Scotland. The management is coordinated by the
Spatial
Information Board and work has been broken down into five main
areas. The two areas of interest to RoS are land, property and
addressing; and service delivery and technical implementation. All
EU member states are
required to submit a monitoring report with details of available
datasets to the European Commission every May. You can read the
UK's most recent
monitoring report
here.

Approach

Our first step was to establish a project and project team to
handle the legal, commercial and technical aspects of
INSPIRE.

During the lifetime of the project we consulted widely with
other European and
UK organisations, both
within and outside our domain. Colleagues within the Scottish
government and
UK geographic community
provided an excellent and knowledgeable resource. This enabled us
to overcome a wide variety of challenges and allowed us to improve
our own expertise in a number of crucial areas.

As well as the technical requirements, we had to consider the
wider implications of
INSPIRE
on our business and staff. These included the effect on our
commercial activity and the types of services we offered, our
IT
infrastructure, and any legal impact on our day-to-day activity.
Each of these requirements was processed by a small
multi-disciplinary team reporting back to the project board who led
the overall
INSPIRE
strategy.

The nature of the legislation naturally broke the project into a
number of phases, each of which required an increasing level of
resource and budget.

Phase 2: discovery and view services - in
November 2011, RoS provided access to the metadata created in
phase 1 to the Scottish Spatial Data Infrastructure. At the same
time, RoS provided a view of its initial cadastral parcel data.
For the deadline, RoS chose to use the services of a third party
(ThinkWhere) to host the
WMS element of the
service.

Phase 3: download - RoS delivered a service that
will allow a customer to download all or part of our land
register dataset. RoS again chose to use professional services of
a Think Where to host the download service. Licensing
considerations on the reuse of data were investigated and led to
the creation of an
INSPIRE
download license.

Phase 4: fully compliant - this phase will
deliver full inspire compliance by supplying parcelled cadastral
data by November 2017.Outcome

RoS has delivered the first three phases and is on course to
fully comply by November 2017. The service is being increasingly
used by customers and has sparked wider thinking about our data
within RoS.

Lessons learned

The majority of the challenges that RoS faced were based on
technical and compliance issues as well as data re-engineering. Our
recommendation for any organisation with an
INSPIRE
obligation would be to ensure your internal domain expertise is
brought together to guarantee you have a firm grasp of the issues
and technical requirements required. For RoS, this meant a
multi-disciplinary team drawn from
IT, Geographic
Information Systems (
GIS),
senior management, legal, commercial and core business. RoS
consulted widely with fellow organisations and took part in a
number of
UK and European working
groups to make sure we had an understanding of our
responsibilities, as well as having an opportunity to influence
those discussions. We would recommend that organisations seek
advice, support and best practice from professional bodies, as well
as learning and investigating best practice from examples
throughout the world, including RoS and the Scottish
Government.

Although the investment in
INSPIRE
can be onerous, there are considerable benefits that can be accrued
if your organisation is committed to
INSPIRE.
For RoS, this meant spatial data has been brought to the forefront
of the business, improved our expertise, developed staff, and led
to several customer-focused initiatives. The core aspect of
INSPIRE,
data, and access to it, led us to re-evaluating data and data
quality, as well as influencing a wider digital transformation
project.

8. Scotland's Environment Web:
EcoHack

Scotland's Environment Web wants to help people discover and
understand more about the environment. Environmental data is really
important - to provide context to reports on the state and quality
of the environment, to improve our understanding of the challenges
and opportunities our environment faces, and encourage communities,
school children and individuals to investigate their own local
environment further, observing what is happening around them,
collect their own data and take action to protect and improve their
local environment.

Background

Putting our objectives into practice, a hackathon event was
organised over the weekend of 30th and 31st May 2015. Students from
universities throughout Scotland were invited to Edinburgh, to come
up with fresh new innovative ideas to make better use of available
data, and to collect new local environmental data that can help
further our understanding, and encourage people to get interested
and get involved in Scotland's Environment.

Interest was generated in the event via a number of routes:

We had university lecturers and students on the steering
group and who also helped out as mentors so were able to help
spread the word to their students and peers.

A leaflet was sent to all universities and posted on their
Facebook pages.

For students one of the most accessible forms of quickly
sharing information is on social media, with a lot of
co-ordinated information sharing posts on Facebook and twitter
(#ScotEcoHack) in the run up to and during the event that were
shared and retweeted to an extended audience, bringing lots of
new twitter followers to @ScotEnvironment following
#ScotEcoHack

During the weekend event we challenged teams of students and
mentors to explore data and develop ideas that could make a real
difference in helping people observe, monitor, educate and take
action in the environment. Ideas were encouraged around exploring
new data relationships to help analyse the state of our environment
and the impact it has on us, develop apps that use and visualise
data to help explain and view the environment, and provide new ways
of collecting and viewing data.

A wide range of open source data was available to the teams -
dataset list - and they were allowed to choose any platform and
programming language and spent the weekend collaborating and being
creative, innovative and inventive.

In the run up to the event, we provided links to information
about a range of environmental issues to inspire new Ecohack ideas,
covering topics such as Air Pollution, Water, Soil, Young People
and Citizen Science, Environmental data, Nature, data
visualisation, EcoSchools, Climate Change and communities, mobile
apps, infographics.

EcoHack mentors

We couldn't have run the event without the help and support from
our mentors. With a wide range of skills and experience, they were
on hand to provide advice and guidance to the students throughout
the development of their ideas from initial scoping and definition
right through to the development and presentation of the
prototypes. Some of the mentors saw some real opportunities in
using some of their own data and tapping into the expertise of
their mentor colleagues, and worked together to develop some of
their own ideas to share with us at EcoHack.

Outcome

Feedback from all who attended was overwhelmingly positive and
we hope to keep in touch with many of those who supported the event
- judges, mentors and students. The standard of ideas was very high
and in the end the judges selected 2 winning ideas and 1 runner up.
More information on the winning ideas and a video of soundbites
from the event on the
EcoHack
webpage.

9. Perth and Kinross Council: Open Data
Workshop

It is important for an organisation to engage data users as it
begins to consider making more of its data open and accessible.
When it comes to how best to engage, there is no one right way.
However, garnering views early will allow particular datasets to be
prioritised for publication. It will allow you to understand what
goals stakeholders and re-users have and what datasets they
identify that would help them to achieve these goals. It will also
offer the opportunity to advertise the release of key datasets to
partner organisations and wider potential re-users. This will help
to create a network of open data advocates.

Background

Perth and Kinross Council covers one of the largest areas of any
council within Scotland and has been one of the fastest growing
areas of Scotland in past decades. With a population of around
147,000 and predicted to grow by another 20% to 2035 they have a
lot of challenges to face that a mature open data framework can
help with. However, like most other public bodies the need to
select the appropriate data sets which are related to city
challenges was an issue. Therefore, Perth and Kinross Council
embarked on a process to allow them to prioritise the datasets they
can release by gaining feedback from key stakeholders.

Approach

Perth and Kinross Council ran an "open data identification"
workshop with community planning partners, regional organisations
and council officers from a range of services. This ensured that a
wide spectrum of individuals were able to give insight into which
data sets would be most useful. The workshop aimed to answer three
main questions:

What are the major challenges facing Perth and Kinross?

What key datasets will help us understand these issues?

How can this data be used to inform policy and service
provision?

To answer these questions attendees were divided into four
groups each with a facilitator. The first issue was to identify the
major challenges facing Perth and Kinross under themes that
included: Live, Work, Visit, Move, Learn and Inform. Attendees were
then asked to come up with key datasets that were pertinent to
these themes. A wide range of issues were identified including:
costs of housing;
GP waiting times;
the services available to an ageing population; low wages; access
to childcare; and access to broadband. If attendees felt that the
pre-identified themes where too restrictive they were encouraged to
come up with their own themes which were added to the set.

Using the answers from the first question the groups then moved
onto identifying potential datasets which could help alleviate or
tackle these challenges. Many datasets were identified as priority,
reflecting a wide range of concerns and challenges facing the area.
Among these were destination of graduates of the local University;
footfall in Perth City Centre; road traffic collisions; crime data;
and statistics for the number of visitors to local events and
attractions.

Further notes from the day included:

There was agreement on the need to involve community groups
in the process of data selection and the crowd sourcing of
community data was also identified as playing an important role
in the platform.

The need to aggregate to anonymise data was stressed. As was
having a robust mechanism in place to ensure data quality.

People wanted to know not only about spending and access to
services, but how it can be broken down by area.

The economic issues identified revolved around the fact that
while unemployment is relatively low, there is a lack of
high-skill, high-wage jobs.

Outcome

The datasets identified by the stakeholder workshop gave Perth
and Kinross' team a solid basis from which to start creating a
Publication Plan, though the process also involved looking at
Council priorities and the plans other local authorities have
published. Along with specific datasets, there were several
reoccurring issues. Perhaps the most prominent of these was the
different challenges faced by urban and rural communities in Perth
and Kinross in terms of issues such as transport, digital
connectivity and access to services. Consideration was given to how
the data platform can reflect these challenges.

In addition, it was the first real chance for the Council to
"advertise" not only the benefits of open data, but also to
announce the development of an open data platform to a wide range
of organisations. This in particular has been vital as the team has
moved towards gathering datasets; knowing that they are grounded in
stakeholders' views of the challenges facing the area and bringing
an understanding of the nature of the data being released.

Next Steps

Perth and Kinross are now considering running future workshops
based around particular themes. While these are yet to be
organised, they are looking to "integrate" open data in number of
topics and major initiatives. For example, this includes areas like
Health & Social Care integration or how the council reports and
manages performance.

10. NHS National Services Scotland: Prescribing
Activity Data

The Scottish Government Open Data Strategy sets out the aim that
Public Sector organisations should aspire to reach at least 3-star
standard open data by 2017. Information Services Division (
ISD)'s
Transforming Information Programme therefore asks us to
look differently at the way we publish and present data and
intelligence. With England, Wales and Northern Ireland already
releasing prescribing activity data in an open format, this
presented an opportunity to learn from and build on the successes
of those who had gone before.

A demonstrably high public interest in prescribing activity data
provided us with a good starting point for publishing and
developing a prescribing Open Data file. This being very much a
pilot for the wider organisation, evaluation of the process and
outcomes became a key component. We have seen some success in
reducing the number of and amount of time spent on Freedom of
Information (
FOI) Requests,
and are now using this publication.

Background

Prescribing was identified as a priority area for developing new
ways of presenting
NHS Scotland
data and intelligence. It enjoys an already extremely high public
interest in its raw data which singles it out for benefits that can
be gained both from reducing the time and effort spent on, and
increasing the value of, any individual data releases. The natural
solution is to place all the data into one file for download by
many.

A public consultation raised the possibility of open data in the
autumn of 2015. It received a record number of responses (27), with
roughly half from outwith the
NHS. A clear
divide emerged between respondents who wanted as much data as
possible to be released (non-
NHS), and
respondents who recognised the value of open data but were to
varying levels concerned about disclosure of patient and prescriber
information (
NHS). A full
summary of responses to this consultation is published on our
website.

We decided on this basis to pilot the publication of a Monthly
Prescribing Activity Data file, pending a disclosure risk
assessment. An organisational aim, to have our publications
compliant with
UK Stats Authority
requirements for Official Statistics, prompted an agreement to
label them "experimental statistics" in recognition of their pilot
status.

Approach

Scotland's island and rural geography uniquely shape the
delivery of primary care, and so our risk assessment focussed on
disclosures which might arise in this context.
NHS Scotland's
data landscape presents some challenges shared by other Scottish
public bodies, particularly those that are community-based.
Organisations may find our disclosure
risk
assessment helpful when contemplating their own.

The core approach of the project was straightforward: replicate
the other
UK nation's prescribing
activity files with
NHS Scotland
data. Although we were fortunate that other nations had led the
way, the responses to our consultation still recommended a cautious
approach and we were proactive in making our plans and our
protections open to scrutiny by national prescriber and pharmacy
leads.

Each file comprising one month of prescribing activity in
Scotland contains over a million rows of data. Given that we were
publishing only a quarter of the volume of the
HSCIC
(England) data we chose to stick with their convention. Later on we
were to encounter several parties who found these files
unmanageable.

Endeavouring to reach out to new audiences we developed a
communications plan centred on social media, in order to garner the
interest, support and feedback of the active Open Data community.
We also felt that the nature of open data meant that we had a
responsibility to make the information accessible to all. Our
latest development has been to produce a visualisation of the data
which allows users to intuitively explore the information contained
within.

Outcomes

ISD
Prescribing aimed to achieve the following through this pilot
project:

1. Complete the
UK picture of prescribing
trends

2. Reduce volume of and amount of time spent on
FOI requests

3. Explore the practicalities of publishing open data and
disseminate lessons learned to the wider organisation

4. Engage new audiences with prescribing data

Although we thought objective 1 would be completed with the
publication of the data, a data quality issue,
detailed
on page 8 of the
FAQ document,
led to suppression of one of the fields. The feedback we received
in relation to this one issue was extensive. Many stated that it is
essential for
UK-wide analysis which,
with eventual publication of the field, actually validated the
outcome. In national stats, acknowledgement that a data release is
being used as intended is surprisingly rare, making this a genuine
win.

Analysis of
FOI workload so
far has returned mixed results. By most measures,
FOI workload has
decreased. The exception to this is the workload from brief
FOI requests,
which would tend to comprise raw data requests subsumed by Open
Data. Contrary to expectations workload on these appears to have
increased as a proportion of the (lower) total. Qualitative
investigation may shed light on this shift.

Practical issues that arose included how we deal with missing
data, the sheer size of the file, and how the data and
supplementary information is presented on the website. A lot of
work has been done to institutionalise the learning from our
venture. Feedback from Open Data Champions within and outwith the
organisation have been invaluable in shaping this learning, as they
can often confront us with the issues that organisationally we
might be blind to.

As part of continuous improvement we have collected feedback and
become aware of a subset of customers who wish to use the data but
find the files unmanageable. With these in mind we have dovetailed
this project with further pilot work in data visualisation. Users
can now explore a high-level summary of each month's Open Data file
at the click of a button.

Lessons learned

Open Data can reduce strain on services receiving relatively
large numbers of
FOI requests,
particularly where these comprise releases of raw data.

Organisations embarking on large data releases are likely to
come across a wealth of locally-specific
IT issues.
These are rarely unassailable.

Consider your audience: data and
IT literacy may
restrict engagement with new audiences.

The Open Data community has established conventions by which
it presents data and supplementary information. Although these
are well-reasoned, largely stemming from ease of discoverability,
they may not be immediately obvious to entrants in the arena.
Fortunately they comprise an active and forthcoming community and
their input can be invaluable when sought.

11. Marine Scotland: Open Data
Network

An organisation's open data publication will likely be comprised
of a number of different strands. Marine Scotland have embarked on
a process to both align their open data approaches and expand the
amount of data they were making open and accessible. This has
culminated in the recent launch of a third open data portal to make
their data more accessible.

Interactions with the new portal have been very positive and
Marine Scotland are starting to promote engagement with it now it
is live. With this open data network, Marine Scotland now have the
right tools in place and are already making much data open and
available.

Background

Marine Scotland cover many aspects of managing Scotland's seas;
from policy development, planning and licenses to enforcement and
science. Marine Scotland had already made progress in terms of
increasing the amount of data they are making open and accessible.
However, they had a challenge in terms of converging and aligning
their already available open data tools and approaches.

Marine Scotland now have three sites in place that make data
more accessible, enabling the public and colleagues to more easily
locate and download data.

Approach

A clear business case was presented to the Marine Scotland
Senior Management Board, and the necessity to align and expand open
data publication efforts was recognised. After an initial review of
available publishing portals,
DKAN
was selected as the most appropriate platform to progress.

Marine Scotland have also mandated particular metadata standards
into the process of dataset publication. Adopting the
MEDIN
metadata standard, no dataset will be made available on either of
the three publication portals unless it has appropriately high
quality metadata attached. While this occasionally slows dataset
publication, it also ensures that consistent metadata collection
will become a routine business practice.

Outcome

Marine Scotland now have in place a 'trinity' of tools to make
data more accessible:

The National Marine Plan interactive (
http://maps.marine.gov.scot)
- which delivers in depth access to
GIS
layers from Marine Scotland and a range of partners (Scottish
Natural Heritage; Scottish Environment Protection Agency; Joint
Nature Conservation Committee; Marine Alliance for Science and
Technology for Scotland and many more). From here you get access
to view the maps, download the ones available, and access more
information about the layers.

Marine Scotland Data Publication Portal (
http://data.marine.gov.scot).
This is where Marine Scotland publish downloadable files and
tabular data. The individual datasets published here are
registered with Digital Object identifiers (
DOI) to
allow better citation of the datasets. Currently, the Data Portal
predominantly hosts more scientific data and reports. Within peer
reviewed journals, there are increasing demand that data
mentioned in papers is made available. There is also demand
around the ability to mint
DOI for
datasets which allows scientists to make data available without
having to place it in orphan repositories.

Marine Scotland Information (
http://marine.gov.scot) -
Marine Scotland's newest portal and where resources are tied
together. On this site, Marine Scotland take in the service data
from the other two platforms and provide information pages where
the relevant maps, data sources and contextual information are
put together. While both the mapping and data portal provide
in-depth information and functionality for the specific jobs that
they do, Marine Scotland Information is meant to be approachable
for all. Users can search across all information types as well as
more descriptive information that puts the maps and data sources
into context. Marine Scotland Information merges content from
several separate sections of Marine Scotland's web, which was
previously used to supply datasets.

On the National Marine Plan Interactive, Marine Scotland now
make approximately 800 spatial data layers/maps available to view.
On the Data Publication Portal, they currently publish 100 data
sets consisting of a mixture of data and reports. Finally, on the
new Marine Scotland Information site, links to all of the above are
available along with an additional 300 information pages crafted
and maintained within Marine Scotland. It also includes hundreds of
links to data sources and map layers from other providers.

Overall, the three sites take in between approximately 500 and
1,000 visitors per month each. While undoubtedly there will be a
proportion of overlaps in these statistics, they are still serving
up a considerable amount of data.

Lessons Learned

The work in Marine Scotland has taken a long time to get to the
position where all of the appropriate tools are in place. Three
sites were eventually chosen rather than one, due to a mixture of
providing enough specialised tools for maps and data along with the
gradual development of the approach.

Marine Scotland are now planning to do further stakeholder
engagement and take in initial user feedback from visiting the
sites. Now the new portal is live, they are also planning further
promotion work. This is likely to be in the form of blog posts and
tweets, along with an increased awareness within both Marine
Scotland and the Open Data Community.

One of the key things will also be to integrate with other new
exercises. So when new initiatives for data sharing in government
and/or the marine data community pops up, Marine Scotland will seek
to use the services now set up to be able to provide data to these
exercises without additional work.

12. Aberdeen City Council: Leisure
App

Many websites confuse the medium of delivery with the content
that they seek to deliver. There is no separation of the
information or data from the presentation, be it html,
PDF, or
print.

This lack of separation means that the data can only be used for
the single reason for which it was published - and even that
publishing is often poorly done.

By separating the data from delivery - and making it available
as Open Data - allows users to consume it, and interact with it in
the way that they need, potentially in much more sophisticated ways
than were originally intended.

Background

Code The City, who now run
ODI Aberdeen
(Scotland's first node of the
Open Data Institute) have run
hack weekends using Open Data in Aberdeen for the last four years.
In 2014, Aberdeen City Council commissioned Code The City to run a
weekend-long session on the theme of Sports Fitness and Wellbeing.
The council, as a service provider, was keen to understand from a
service user's point of view what got in the way of their using the
city's sports facilities to their full potential.

Several ideas were put forward, refined, and then teams formed
to work on these. Some rapid prototyping followed. By tea time
Sunday the attendees had developed a number of prototypes which
were demonstrated to the council sports staff.

One prototype sought to address a specific problem which had
been identified in relation to access to sport centre timetables.
Its aim was to provide not only a solution to that but to show what
might be possible if a better approach was taken to timetable
data.

Approach

At the hack weekend it was shown that someone coming to the city
council website, in the expectation of finding information on what
sports activities were provided at what time, would face two
hurdles: redirection to the websites of eight arm's length service
providers; then 31 different timetables in a variety of formats.
Many of these were poorly presented and were designed for print,
not web.

Over the weekend, the data from these timetables was extracted
using a combination of techniques including manual transcription
and machine scraping of the data. A database was created and all
timetable data was imported, and the data enhanced, which included
adding geographic co-ordinates for all venues.

Finally a search mechanism was created allowing citizens to
quickly find what they wanted through a single interface.

Outcome

Subsequent to the hack weekend, the Sports team commissioned the
creation of a mobile app (which drew on the updated open data
store) which allowed users to search, navigate and locate sports
classes within geographic and time parameters; to store
preferences, eliminate irrelevant classes; and for users rate
classes for exertion levels. The app was designed after extensive
user input and testing ensuring that specific, articulated needs
were addressed.

Creating an Open Data store to hold timetable data allowed the
data to be repurposed many times, for many purposes. While
maintaining that data store raised issues which meant that the
processes of multiple providers had to be changed to put the data
(rather than the presentation) first and to ensure continuity of
publication, the benefits to end users were clear and there was
commitment to the continuity of data publication.